Tokyo After Midnight
by Ninjagrrl
Summary: Telepathy cuts both ways. Schuldich wakes up in a cell, and everything goes downhill from then on. A slightly odd post tower fic, featuring crazy!Schu and vague SchuldichFarfarello.


Tokyo After Midnight

Author's Notes- A peculiar little fic I found on my computer. No idea where it came from, but I quite like a few bits and thought it might be worth putting up, especially since I haven't written any Weiss fic in forever. Concrit very welcome!

Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended. Also, I'm fairly certain I've nicked the ending from some book or film. It just seems far too familiar to me.

- - -

Schuldich wakes.

Schuldich is used to coming around slowly with excruciating headaches. Most mornings find him swearing and fumbling blindly for a pillow, a sheet, anything to cover his eyes, while splintery morning light sends pain needling through his mind. He couldn't count the number of times he's woken up after being sedated, after a twelve hour bar crawl, after head injuries, after knocking himself out from mental over-exertion. Waking up this time feels a little bit like being sedated by the hospital that found him pistol-whipped in the gutter after telepathically attempting to alter all of Tokyo's minds at the end of a week-long drinking binge. It hurts.

He's had worse headaches, but not by far. Even the weight of his own head against the pillow threatens to break his skull open and spill out the throbbing, raw contents, but when he tries to lift it, he quickly learns that any movement sends fresh pain screaming red through every fibre of his nervous system. It's difficult to even tell which way is up when it feels as though someone's dumped the contents of his head into a blender with a handful of broken glass and nails.

When he finally manages to move one hand gingerly up towards his face, he isn't surprised to feel tacky blood drying on his face. A nosebleed. A minor enough injury that could easily be passed off as nothing at all, but Schuldich knows that if he kept exploring he'd find more blood drying down the side of his face. Bleeding from the ear is a sign of brain trauma, and in his case, it wouldn't come from hitting his head. Schuldich has been lucky so far, clocking up six brain haemorrhages over his life and nothing vital has stopped working yet. About a third of strokes result in disability, they say. Rosenkreuz is full of telepaths that have been left paralysed or blind.

But when he's finally able to move, everything still works. He experimentally flexes one limb at a time, feels the wave of nausea that accompanies each movement, and rides it out. His balance is off, and Schuldich doesn't try to sit up. Eyesight blurred, and all he can make out is too much white everywhere. He could be anywhere, and it's difficult to care right now, not with the pain in his head. It comes and goes, and sweeps over him in great giddying waves that carry all coherent thought with them. In between, there isn't quite a calm, but he can think and see a little of the world just before him. There's nothing of interest there- white sheets, a pillow, both in the thin sort of material associated with constant wear and too many boil washes. Some sort of institution, then. It could be anything from a cheap hotel, through to hospitals or a cell.

Schuldich has no idea how long he's been out. Years could have passed, and all of Tokyo fallen to dust. He's dreamed entire lifetimes while he was unconscious. Now every movement feels rusty and unused, there's a dried-up, medicinal taste like cotton swabs in his mouth, and bruises blossoming in the crook of a pale arm. He runs a finger over them and waits for the current wave of pain to subside, to let his eyes clear enough to make them out. One is purple with fresh blood blooming just under the surface and a tiny red dot still in the centre, but there's a yellow stain besides it. It wasn't there before, and so by the fading, he judges he's been here at least ten days.

Crawford is dead.

It already feels distant. Schuldich is a selfish creature and he has more pressing concerns at the moment; namely the pain and his current location. He reaches out and traces the edge of a bed, the texture of cotton grating raw against his skin. Beyond that, everything is a white smeary blur. He considers reaching out telepathically, and a wave of nausea sweeps over him at the thought. A protective measure, one he's had before when he's thrown his gift out, like waking up with a hangover and heaving at the imagined taste of alcohol. Even lifting his head is too much, and he clings to the end of the bed as the world swings giddily underneath him. Everything is white and changing and nothing is stable.

His head drops sharply back onto the pillow with a burst of pain that leaves him breathless, and he wonders if this is what a fractured skull feels like. Everything dazzles red, and the only reason he hasn't thrown up is that there's nothing left to bring up. Schuldich's hair still traps the wild, salty smell of the ocean, and he lets it fall over him as he waits for the pain to take him away.

- - -

It takes even longer to wake up this time. If he's going to go into a coma or die from whatever he did to himself, Schuldich hopes it'll hurry up and happen. He doesn't particularly care about getting out any more, or finding out what happened at the tower, or avenging Schwarz or any of that nonsense. Schuldich isn't a hero. He's just sick of all the pain.

After a while, he can see a little. He experimentally moves his hand back and forward in front of his eyes, great jangles of arthritic pain ratcheting up from his joints like a man three times his age. Everything's blurred, and beyond a few inches, skin and white walls blend together into a vague watercolour mess. So his sight hasn't cleared up any. It's been on its way out for years and he'd probably be declared legally blind for good this time. It doesn't matter. There's not much to see here anyway.

It takes an hour to explore the room, small though it is. He can't see anything until it's looming right before him, and then he finds his fingers are more reliable than his eyes anyway, even if every texture scrapes like sandpaper against his raw nerves. Schuldich slowly traces the walls and tries to count his steps to work out how big it is, but the numbers jump around, German and English and Japanese digits all at once, and he can't hold onto them long enough to work it out. There's a constant rushing in his head, all the voices blaring together like a TV with the sound turned up so high it's distorted. There are a lot of other people here. He can be sure of that, at least. They're all screaming.

Exhausted, Schuldich slides down the wall in the corner and waits for the sickness to calm down again so he can get back to bed. It's a cell of some kind. That much is clear.

Something scuffles to his side, in the cell next door. He shuffles backwards until he finds the source of the sound.

In the corner of the cell, a network of cracks rise up from the floor. Pieces of plaster have fallen away, and he scrapes at it, cautiously. An enormous piece comes loose, and beyond that there's a broken piece of brick that comes out. The hole doesn't quite reach into the next cell, but it's not far off. He puts the piece of plaster back. Replaced, the edges look like nothing more than cracks. It must have taken some previous prisoner a long time to dig away like this.

Schuldich dissembles it again. He can fit his hand into the hole. On the other side, there's just plaster between himself and the next cell. He taps on it, thoughtfully. The impact sends jagged waves of pain spiking back up his arm, as though he's just plugged himself into a jackhammer.

"Schuldich?"

It's Farfarello.

"Yes," He said, his voice dry and unused. Desperation forces it out, although he feels as though he's been anaesthetised. It sounds like the voice of someone after a stroke, an old man, and Schuldich is only in his mid-twenties and already hopelessly used up.

More movements. He presses closer against the wall. He isn't alone.

"Wait," Schuldich cuts Farfarello off before he speaks. It takes several deep breaths before he can form the next word. "Bugged."

Wherever they are, people like Schwarz won't be allowed to talk freely. There's another wave of dizziness and he rides it grimly, reaching out to wherever he thinks Farfarello's mind is in the middle of all that mess. When he thinks he has it, Schuldich sends out his first thought.

Something cracks as Schuldich's jaw locks up tight, his mouth filling with blood as he keeled over. A number of wildly unrelated thoughts flashed through his mind- lightbulbs exploding, balloons bursting, a sudden high keening of sea wind, the sharp smell of sand and salt and blood. He struck his forehead against the wall, but that was lost in far greater pain.

OK. He wants to say that he's OK. Schuldich manages to force out a sound like it, exhaling hard for the 'O' and making some strange, strangled noise for the 'K'. It sounds good enough, so he repeats it a few times while he's dragging himself around until he's at least facing the hole in the wall. He lets the blood run from his mouth carelessly, along with something sharp that feels like a chip taken from a tooth.

"What happened?" Farfarello's voice is sharp, and needles through Schuldich's head.

"Telepathy," He keeps breathing hard, shaping clumsy words. "Can't."

Farfarello is quiet, perhaps hearing the pain in Schuldich's voice. After a while, Schuldich spits out the last of the cooling blood and shifts himself away from it, hair stringy and wet. His throat is still coated with the stuff and it's making him nauseous, but for now all he can do is lie there, shuddering, and let it slowly run out.

"How long?" He asks, bringing his arm up slowly so he can look at the bruises again, painting a swathe of red across the floor. The yellow looks even weaker now. If he stares long enough, he can just see a pale watercolour stain underneath the skin. He isn't sure if it's his own fading vision, or if more time has passed. Days could be slipping away from him, or perhaps it's only been hours.

"A while. I don't know."

Schuldich wasn't surprised. Farfarello's world is timeless. All times at once blend seamlessly in his mind, and he lets the hours run away unheeded. Unless there's something he needs to wait for, he lets it go. Farfarello never notices the other cues people regulate time by- alarm clocks, a milk round, the roar of evening traffic or a favourite television programme.

"Where are we?" Schuldich asked. The pooled blood keeps seeping in again whenever he speaks and it annoys him, so he slowly claws his way back up into a seating position, ignoring the jangling pain up and down his spinal cord. His mind feels almost liquidised by that last assault, gone to a soupy mess swirling around his skull like a meaningless ocean vortex, crimson and black jags of pain still fracturing up his vision.

"Kritiker. I think."

"Crawford's dead, isn't he?"

"Yes," No regret in Farfarello's voice. Death doesn't mean much to him either. He isn't very sentimental any more.

The pain wasn't fading. Schuldich rested against the wall, and it felt as though his skull would crumble into bone splinters and raw, liquid pulp. Sitting straight up isn't any better. His balance is gone, and he sways drunkenly, trying to keep upright and wondering if that's gone for good too.

"Talk to me," He needs distracting. There's nothing here- no sight, no time, no people. He can't even feel Farfarello between the wall that separates them. "Anything. Talk about London."

London was significant, because it was the first place they went as a team. Schuldich and Crawford had picked up the other two at Rosenkreuz a week ago. Nagi was already a sullen, silent child. He held little interest for Schuldich, once he'd realised he couldn't get to the boy. Any attempts at provocations, the slightest jibes, outright insults- they rolled straight off Nagi, and his telepathy assured him that it wasn't an act. Nagi really didn't care. He'd started with nothing and had nothing else to lose.

Crawford was ambivalent about London. He was about most places. Crawford went there for a job, not for a holiday. He could fit in anywhere. Languages and local customs were never a barrier to him. Nagi spent most of his time in the hotel room. He lived in the substanceless half-world strung between computers and servers. That left Schuldich and Farfarello to explore London together, jumping on whichever bus or tube looked interesting. Neither had much interest in tourist attractions, although they visited the Tower for its history of torture and execution. "They say that if the ravens ever leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall," Schuldich told Farfarello, tapping the outline of his handgun thoughtfully as he watched ragged shapes flutter on clipped wings. "What do you think?"

They spent some time around the West End, wandering by Piccadilly Circus's neon lights into theatres and art galleries without ever having to pay. Telepathy made it easy enough to get past the bouncers and the overpriced drinks, but they fitted right in at Notting Hill, where Schuldich was amused to find that most people assumed he was some sort of flamboyant international art dealer.

Camden was interesting too, and no one looked twice at them here. In the crowded street markets, they were lost in a sea of teenagers who voluntarily dyed their hair white and orange and green and blue, and painted their eyes like butterflies. They got pierced in a studio brighter and cleaner than any dentist that Schuldich had ever visited, killed a young London goth in the middle of a smoky club, and were amused to find she wasn't as in love with death as she'd thought.

In between, they wandered through parks filled with used needles and drifts of bleached crisp packets, or lost themselves in the underground waiting for the cold lifeless breath of the next tube, making their way out through tiled tunnels that smelled faintly of piss and were the same yellowed colour. Farfarello killed the occasional drug dealer and Schuldich threw almost a handful of pure cocaine into the air and watched hundreds of pounds of drugs twinkle like diamond dust under the lurid neon lights of Soho's sex shops. There, they discovered the gay area and wandered down Old Compton Street. Schuldich wanted to visit G-A-Y, but was put off by the groups of identical young men waiting to go in, all with blonde boy-band haircuts, cropped tops and glitter.

Schuldich's headache eases slightly as Farfarello's voice goes on, speaking not in Japanese or German, but in soft Irish-accented English, deceptively melodic words that usually hide an unspoken threat. The memories are always nighttime, and the panic and disorientation slip away. Somewhere, outside these walls, it's Tokyo and it's always after midnight.

- - -

They've done something to him. His shields are gone and he can hear the people around him screaming all night long.

It's getting to him. He runs fingers over his temple and could swear his skull is _pulsing_, like something ripe and rotten and about to burst. Brief images flash through his mind- puffball mushrooms, tumours, raw meat studded with shards of glass. There's too much blood in his head, rushing like a radio broadcast full of static. He wants to rupture something and let it all drain away, doesn't care if it takes his consciousness with it.

Farfarello was silent, maybe drugged and maybe not there at all. Schuldich felt a rising sort of panic. He didn't think he could survive here by himself, without someone else to bring him out of that indiscriminate background noise.

"Think Nagi will tell anyone?" He asks the empty room. No one answers, and he slowly replaces the broken plaster and hides the hole in the wall. Only using his left hand, this time, his right side has gone numb and useless. He can clumsily scrape his hand back and forward across the floor, but his fingers don't open independently any more, and when he tries to stand his right leg is nothing but a wooden prop underneath him. He can walk a bit, swinging it clumsily from the hip, but his balance is all shot to shit and after the first couple of falls, he didn't bother any more.

Farfarello isn't there to hear, but Schuldich talks anyway. He talks about New York, this time. New York was always busy, and he fills the cell with the ghosts of people they met there. The millionaire in the next hotel suite that they killed, the prostitute Schuldich had borrowed cigarettes from, a client they had thrown out of his own penthouse apartment. That was the second place Schwarz visited.

Schuldich decided he didn't like Americans shortly after they arrived at the airport. It was nothing personal, Schuldich didn't really like any nationality. But he'd found overall, there was some truth in the stereotypes. German airports handled their business with calm, clinical efficiency. England was polite, but reserved. America almost poured itself all over them as soon as they landed, everywhere there were cheerful little flags and Coca Cola vending machines and smiling blonde staff tripping over their heels to help them.

New York was suffocating. He'd taken a couple of bad turns while they were there, a place so overrun with people they'd stacked them up fifty storeys high. At least it was good practise for Tokyo. Still, he spent a lot of those nights on the hotel balcony, flipping cigarette stubs into smoky pollution and hoping they'd still be smouldering when they landed in someone's hair. Up right against the sky, and still not high enough to lift himself above all the blaring, mindless white noise people churn out.

They had bonded in London, and in New York they became something more. Not lovers. Schuldich only loves himself and Farfarello doesn't even know what love is.

- - -

No one comes into the cell when he's awake. The water tastes bitter all the time, and he can't tell what drugs are in there. He should do- Schuldich has plenty of experience with them. Back when his telepathy first emerged, there were antipsychotics, until he worked out how to control the strange surging power in his head and thought his way out of psychiatric care. Before Eszet found him, he self-medicated with anything he could buy on the street, benzodiazepines mostly. Morphine when it was worst, smack if he couldn't get morphine, although he'd go without if possible after having to brainwash _himself_ out of a heroin addiction at twenty. When Eszet found him, he got used to the really good stuff that didn't just sedate him until he couldn't care less about the pain. The bitter taste here reminds him of the painkillers he's been on for the last five years, but there's probably something else in it to keep him compliant or make him talk, maybe. He tried going without it, only to find out he was craving it far more than he should. His throat wasn't dry, but this was a deeper thirst.

He isn't sure if the isolation meant to be a form of psychological torture or not. Schuldich remembers white rooms, restraints, a lot of screaming, and wonders if they'd brought him out to interrogate him. If so, he doesn't think he talked, but it's impossible to tell. It might be a memory from here, but it could be years into the past. It's not the first time he's been in hospital, and it's hard to keep track of anything now.

"Hey, do you remember.."

It's nice retreating into the past, when his skull didn't feel like caved in papier-mache, and he goes there a lot. Sometimes he talks about the past and Farfarello listens, and sometimes he prompts Farfarello and lets him talk. Accented English in the middle of a country full of sharp jabbing syllables, taking him all the way around the world, because Schwarz went everywhere in their short career. Today, he feels cold. He suspects they're changing his drugs, and he can already feel the slow burning thirst of withdrawal kicking in. He asks about India this time.

India is pleasantly far away from the cold, cramped ache seizing him up inside. Schuldich relaxes under the memory of heated spiced air drifting into his cell from times long past. He liked India. He liked the incongruency of it all. He'd enjoyed the expensive hotels they had frequented, casually walking into penthouse apartments to mingle with international businessmen and liquid-eyed Bollywood actresses. But he also liked the Calcutta slums. There were still the remains of imperial buildings propping up a corrugated iron lean-to, human children and slat-sided cows picking their way side-by-side through streams of thin filthy water. They didn't kill many people there. There was no point.

"Keep talking," He tells Farfarello, and hopes it never stops for good. Everything hangs on a distant voice now.

- - -

There's a wet sort of crunching from the cell next to him. He rolled over, drowsiness slipping away.

"Farfarello?"

"The walls," Farfarello said shortly, and Schuldich reaches blindly above his head to touch the cool plaster. Now that Farfarello's mentioned it, he thinks it might be an external wall. He touches the adjoining wall, experimentally. It might be his imagination, but he swears there's a fractional difference in their temperatures, as if one backs onto cool night air.

They might not be on the ground floor. In fact, Schuldich doesn't entertain hopes they are. It doesn't matter anyway. Farfarello could shatter most of his bones and he wouldn't do anything more than maybe chip a couple of bricks if he's very lucky. Even if it worked, Schuldich thinks they'd be too high up. He doesn't mind that so much. There's no time in his cell, but whenever he thinks about it, it's always night outside the room and he's always spilling out into polluted Tokyo air.

Tokyo, now.

Schuldich could settle in a place like Tokyo. He talks this time, rambles almost. Sometimes his voice gets away from him and he realises that he's screaming, but no one comes to interrupt or tell him to keep it down. Sometimes he realises he hasn't been talking out loud at all, but Farfarello still seems to understand. He thinks Farfarello is still there, anyway.

They've been in Tokyo for a while. Schuldich thinks maybe a year, but there's no time here and he can't remember a place when there ever was time at all. He was quite taken with the city, and they didn't even take time to unpack before they were gone out into the smoky night to explore. And they've still been exploring Tokyo for however long they've been in the country, and still haven't finished. It's more densely packed than any of the places they've explored before. There are shops layered on top of shops, and homes built on top of that. Entire lives squeezed into a studio apartment, all breathing the same circulating, polluted air. It reminds Schuldich of a hive. Even worse because (and it's a cliché, he knows) all Asians look alike to him.

They visited silent shrines at night, read the prayers that visitors leave to see what they're appealing for and throw the ones they don't like into the garden ponds. They visit the geisha districts in Kyoto, where modern-day girls wore ancient, secret smiles, tantalisingly slim under yards and yards of butterfly-brilliant kimono. There were festivals, where they went to stare at the cherry blossom and wonder what the hell all the fuss was about. The parks were full of billowing, cottony blossom and shrines and statues, but there were homeless people there too, and repressed Japanese teenagers drinking out of their parents' sight. It's childish to spoil their fun, when they'll be working fourteen hours a day in school, all for the privilege of working another fourteen hours a day in the workplace and maybe dropping dead from _karoshi_ at the end of it all, but Schuldich likes to ruin things for them anyway.

They went to Harajuku, where brilliantly dressed Japanese teenagers posed for photographs like their Camden cousins thousands of miles away. There were gothic lolitas tottering unsteadily on platformed shoes, layers of frothing tulle and lace and bows billowing gracefully around them as they posed for a tourist. Black lipstick is considered passé in London, Schuldich told them, while they fawned over his milk pale skin and hard blue eyes. And their photonegatives, the ganguro teens dressed like some undiscovered inner city tribe, their bleached hair backcombed and filled with extensions and beads and neon braids, thin arms stained brown and studded with row after row of plastic bracelets. A cosplayer, dressed in full nazi uniform. Schuldich amicably asked him the time, in German, just to see the kid jump.

Most of the memories there are at night though, navigating by candy neon lights. They liked to taunt the local yakuza. Small time stuff mostly, street fighting or gambling or ruining a deal here or there, not much that _has _to end with them throwing a corpse into the sewers, although it often does. Crawford generally tolerates it, so long as it's nothing that could jeopardise their real work.

In and out of notorious Tokyo fetish clubs, nothing as scintillating as they claim. It's all smoke and mirrors and costumes, no real sex or violence. The blood's always fake, and when the clothes come off, the nipples and pubic hair are sewn onto pale bodysuits. Serenading a client in a karaoke bar with Schuldich's rendition of the most awful or lewd songs he can think of, sometimes singing in German so they can't tell what he's saying and sometimes singing in Japanese so they can. Crawford's mouth is thin with disapproval, Farfarello's faintly amused, and Nagi's still kneeling soberly in the corner, uncaring either way.

The streets were lined with prostitutes, girls who looked strangely tiny and doll-like to Schuldich against their Western counterparts. They saw the _gaijin_ and immediately put on their acts, giggling with hands over their mouths, twirling a ponytail. Underneath it all, there was the same corruption. Sometimes Schuldich sleeps with them and sometimes he doesn't, and it doesn't matter, it's only one hour here or there out of the endless Tokyo night.

- - -

One day, Farfarello disappears.

Schuldich was patient at first. He thought he could wait a day, and then a day stretched into another and maybe several all in a row, suddenly streaming out from underneath him with nothing left to hold onto, and he didn't want to know what lay at the end of that long downhill fall. He waited as long as he could before reaching out telepathically, gambling whatever was left of his mind on the gift that had turned against him. When he finally used it, something ruptured almost painlessly this time.

He wakes up choking out pink foam and blood clots, no idea where it's all coming from, but next time it's going to kill him or destroy him altogether. Schuldich never cared enough to learn about the biological basis of telepathy- all he cared about was that he had it and what he could do with it- but now he pictures it in abstract terms. Dying, sputtering strip lighting, dirty neon light choked out behind flyspattered plastic, a bare lightbulb swinging in an empty room, then nothing at all but blown-out blackened glass. Entire regions of his mind would go to blank empty ventricles and clogs of useless scar tissue and tangled messes of neurons. And somewhere, in the middle of all that ruin, there's Schuldich.

He cried a little for the others, in a monotonous, self-pitying way that sounds over-tired even to himself. For Crawford, because he'd never really imagined that someone like the Oracle would die, for Nagi, dead or out there alone, for whatever had happened to Farfarello. But mostly, Schuldich just weeps for his own lost sanity.

Time begins to slip away again, running away between his fingers like water. He thinks about a lot of things, vaguely, unable to hold onto anything for very long any more. When the thought stays in his decaying mind long enough, he often wonders if he'd change his circumstances if he could. Schuldich decides he probably wouldn't. He's spent too much time in inferior minds to tolerate the thought of being ordinary. He never wanted to work for what he has, to meet someone normal and have three children and a dog and a house with a white picket fence. He's fucked up, left hundreds dead, thrown international organisations into conflict, and he has no regrets. If he could do everything all over again, he'd take the migraines and the risks and always having to look over his shoulder. He'd rethink that grand overthrowing-Eszet idea though.

And for the first time, someone is there. Schuldich leans against the wall and moves in, closer, awkwardly, but he doesn't really care how he looks any more. It's not as if he can feel their pity, and if he can't feel it, then as far as he's considered, it isn't there at all. Whoever it is doesn't disappear this time, or rearrange themselves into nothing more than the shadow or the outline of a door. Instead, the vague blur solidifies as he gets closer, so that even his failing sight can make out dark hair, a suit, even see the faint smear of eyes somewhere up there.

"Crawford?" He asks, disbelievingly.

"I'm Nagi, Schuldich," the man says, his voice surprisingly gentle. "Crawford died."

"You idiot," And Schuldich went lax against the wall. He knew that Crawford had died, of course, but he'd never really believed that Nagi escaped by himself. And now their youngest member is an adult. "How many years?"

"Four," Nagi says.

"When did they find you?" He asks.

"They?" He can't see if Nagi looks confused and his voice is as flat and toneless as it ever was, but Schuldich doesn't think Nagi understands.

"Kritiker."

"Kritiker never caught me," He can hear the frown in Nagi's voice, and Schuldich believes him. Nagi could bring the building down around them if he wanted to. He didn't come here unwillingly.

"I see," Schuldich says, a thin smile threatening to bubble over into laughter, the kind that he knows he won't be able to stop. "How long have you been working here then?"

"This isn't Kritiker, Schuldich," Nagi says, catching on, and now he looks wary. Schuldich wanted to read his mind, but everything's jumbled up now and anyway, Kritiker have probably developed psychic implants or shields or they've drugged him or something. "You're in Eszet, in the hospital wing. You've always been here."

"Then why didn't you visit?"

"I did," Nagi says softly. "You've been ill, ever since the tower. You never recognised me."

Schuldich won't believe that, though he still has uneasy images of white rooms and screaming and needles, and he won't believe it, he's held out this long and now they're having to bring in a brainwashed Nagi or maybe just an actor to see what he'll spill.

"If this is Eszet, then what did they do to Farfarello?"

"Farfarello?"

"He disappeared," Schuldich turns his face towards unanswering walls, and they're padded now. He shuffles towards the back to scrape away the plaster and show Nagi, and there's nothing there but scratched wipe-clean plastic, a square brighter and newer than all the rest. He looks down, and for the first time, feels old dull pain in his fingertips. Most of the nails are misshapen from growing back one too many times, the tips thick with scar tissue. He carries on looking anyway, seeing if he can strip away the padding and find the hole. They drugged him and changed the cell, or they covered it up.

"He was never in that cell," Nagi paused, clearly uncertain about what he should say. "I told you. Farfarello died at the tower, Schuldich."

"I'll _show_ you," he tells Nagi, suddenly desperate. "I'll _show_ you," and never mind the sudden needling in his temples, Schuldich's reaching out to Farfarello who's out there somewhere, throwing himself out into a mental world filled with the dull roar of Tokyo traffic, murmuring Indian voices, electro-tribal industrial beats from a London goth club. Nagi's trying to say something, protesting maybe, but the sounds are swamped and swept away forever under the oceanic rush of blood as Schuldich's mind spills out into the smoky Tokyo midnight.


End file.
